@ColinWright, can you help out with following text from the article? Just don't want to miss out on the inner meaning of the message from father to son. Many thanks!
> "I'm sorry. Tha wain't say nowt to thi mam nar, will tha? This is just between us men."
Tha = thee, the familiar form of "you". "Only thee-thou's them as thee-thou's you": family and close friends only. This is dying out. I recall my Yorkshire grandmother using it, but only intermittently.
wain't = won't
nar = now
These are both on the other side of a vowel shift.
Nowt = nothing. This is a bit of dialect that's still alive, partly due to its use in the TV advertising slogan "Bread wi' Nowt Taken Out".
TV and the class system have long worked against UK regional accents and dialect.
I live in Leeds now, but grew up in Nottingham (70 miles south, also coal-mining country) and we said "owt" and "nowt" - but pronounced like "oat", not "out".
Also your stereotypical Yorkshire would shorten "the" to "t'" (going down t'pit) - we would drop it completely "guin' dahn pit".
Sometimes I reckon Yorkshire folks think I'm taking the piss the way I say things.
I was at Uni with a bloke from Burnley, and he used to say "obbat" and "nobbat" (for "owt" and "nowt" respectively), although I've never heard them since.
The main one to get is "tha" and "thi" which are various pronunciations of "thee." Archaiac pronouns, "thee," "thou" etc are still used in various english regional dialects.
When I was a kid in the south west I used to hear people say "About she-high" or "about yay (yea?) high" when gesturing to approximate the size of an object.
> "I'm sorry. Tha wain't say nowt to thi mam nar, will tha? This is just between us men."